[tm-pubsubj-comment] ISSUE 4 - Relationships between subjects

[Steve Pepper <pepper@ontopia.net>]

Bernard wrote (in 
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tm-pubsubj/docs/recommendations/issues.htm):

>-- Do the relationships between subjects, e.g. class/subclass,
>belong to each PSI?
>
>-- Or should they be declared outside individual PSIs, in the
>general PS Doc structure?
>
>-- Should they be declared at all?
>
>Proposal:
>
>When relationships with other subjects are inherent to the
>definition of a subject (ex: taxonomy, thesaurus) they should
>be declared inside each individual Subject Indicator.
>
>In other cases, the relationships should not belong to the PS
>Doc itself, but the PS Doc could reference resources (e.g.
>topic maps) using such relationships.

It seems to me that this is really only a problem when PSI
sets are being published in some machine processable knowledge
representation like topic maps (or RDF).

The reason for using such a representation would be to enable
re-use through merging, querying, or other forms of automated
processing.

When that is the case, publishers should be encouraged to only
make formal assertions that are strictly necessary (e.g.,
assigning base names). The more assertions they make, the
greater the likelihood that other people will find those
assertions either uninteresting, controversial, or downright
wrong, and the less likely those people will be to use the PSI
set for automated processing.

However, when the PSI is simply a piece of text that only humans
can interpret, assertions that help provide an unambiguous
indication of the subject will simply be used to help the user
decide whether or not that subject is the one they are interested
in. For example, the following two definitions (taken from
encyclopedia.com) contain assertions that are necessary in order
to disambiguate the two subjects called "Alexandre Dumas":

   Dumas, Alexandre, known as Dumas père, 1802-70, French
   novelist and dramatist.

   Dumas, Alexandre, known as Dumas fils, 1824-95, French
   dramatist and novelist, illegitimate son of Dumas Père.

In addition to base name assertions, these contain alternative
base names, dates of birth and death, nationality, profession
and even parentage: all of them assertions about the subject.
Now, we might have inside information that Dumas fils was actually
the son of Louis Bonaparte(!), but that wouldn't prevent us from
using a PSI like the one above.

Clearly, discouraging these kinds of assertions would be wrong.

So, my proposal is that we encourage informal assertions that
help indicate the subject and (to the extent that we even talk
about publishing PSI sets in a machine processable knowledge
representation) we discourage unnecessary formal assertions.

Steve

--
Steve Pepper, Chief Executive Officer <pepper@ontopia.net>
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34/WG3  Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps)
Ontopia AS, Waldemar Thranes gt. 98, N-0175 Oslo, Norway.
http://www.ontopia.net/ phone: +47-23233080 GSM: +47-90827246